A More Efficient Option for VoD
In contrast to Unicast IP described earlier, I want to describe a misbegotten black sheep of the Internet protocol family; it’s called Multicast IP. Multicast is a one-to-many communication means. An individual server entity can deliver content to a group of subscriber STBs concurrently. IP Multicast is a bandwidth conserving means, specifically designed to reduce network traffic by simultaneously delivering a single element of content data, to a plurality of recipients.
Not surprisingly, Multicast is not without its complications, but to be fair, supporting high volumes of unicast isn’t exactly a picnic. The quantity of concurrent recipients using Multicast is relatively unbounded, but there are practical implementation limits.
Through the methods described on this site, a single server thread can do the work of thousands. The aggregate network bandwidth consumption is reduced nearly by the same proportion.
Hybrid VoD 